Its fun to see all the dependencies that your computer needs. I did install it on hardware. (Planned to use it as a daily driver and dual boot Bazzite for gaming on the weekends. Got lazy and now sticking with Bazzite).

I think its a fun Saturday/weekend project to boot up a VM and go through the install process to see what’s behind the scenes that your “normal” OS does for you.

When I first installed Gentoo, it was because it was one of only around three distros that supported x86_64 at the time. Yes, that was a long time ago.

I’ve kept it as a daily driver for a number of reasons. First, because I’m a control freak, and Gentoo goes out of its way to allow me to select exactly the packages I want, and gives me access to all the knobs and switches that other distros may hide in the name of user-friendliness.

Second, because once installed it’s surprisingly solid and trouble-free—Portage is an excellent (if slow) package manager that, judging from what I’ve heard from people running other distros, is better than the average at preventing breakage, and since it’s rolling-release there are no whole-distro upgrades to complicate things. I ran one system on rolling updates for 17 years without reinstalling, and it was still pretty much up-to-date on all packages when I retired it back in March—try that with Ubuntu. (The replacement system also runs Gentoo.)

Thirdly, I’ve been with Gentoo for so long that I know how to create packages, unbork a system that I’ve messed up by doing something really stupid, and various other tricks. If I went to another distro, I’d have to relearn much of that from scratch.

(A fourth reason for some might be that it supports a wider range of CPU architectures than any other distro except possibly Debian.)

I think in the day when desktop Linux was jankier and you had to tweak things a lot to get them to work well it was more beneficial to have a distro where you just compiled everything from source anyways. Now it is anachronistic, IMO.

I use gentoo, i’m setting up my new installation right now hehe.

I really like this way of managing my own OS, of takes lots time to get a solid root, but it ends in the perfect environment for me, and my laptop.

• i am a intermediary linux user, and after using gentoo for some time, i lean SO MUCH MORE about linux, it’s exiting uwu

I recently tried Gentoo, I liked it, dare I say I loved it. The problem is, I don’t have time for it. I would love to use it as a daily driver on my main rig but due to my work it would never fly.

I am however thinking of putting it on my server where I just don’t need to spend time with it. I can compile and and just let it be while I do something else.

I used it for a couple of years, it’s great if you love customizability and want to run a very clean system. However, the last straw for me was when I needed to edit an image, realized I didn’t had Gimp, so I installed it (which took a long time since I needed to compile it), opened it and it wouldn’t open the image because it was a PNG (I think, or jpg, the specific format doesn’t matter) and that format requires a compilation flag to be enabled, I added that flag globally because why the hell would I not want to have support for it, and recompiled my entire system. By the time I had GIMP able to edit the image I didn’t even remember what I was going to do. I went back to arch not long after that, but always missed defining the packages I want in files to keep the system organized and lean.

Full time user of Gentoo since 20+ years here. Oll servers, workstations, laptops and even on an android tablet once.

It’s not complicated at all, mostly just different from anything else. And truly configurable to the last bit.

Edit: it seems there aren’t may gentooers here, AMA :)

I ran it 2003-2006ish.

Having a package manager that updates online was a game changer for Linux distributions.

I had been using slackware for 6 years prior, and there was no real update path. Best case you’d just get the latest release on CD and install it over your (hopefully) separate root partiton.

Conpiling all your stuff sounded like a good idea in the age of the architecture options at the time. Alpha, Crusoe, PowerPC, SPARC and MIPS were all viable options.

I’m using it right now, at least for personal project development. It’s surprisingly reliable. Aside from the well-known USE flags that let you nitpick stuff at compile time letting me mix newer stuff while keeping the rest stable.

I do have my complaints:

• it’s rolling release, making it less fitting for production use, tho not as bleeding edge as Arch
• the package management logic could perhaps be more robust; one of my pet peeves is that it keeps pulling the latest version of Python despite not being used
• some slight, relatively meaningless changes in package metadata might trigger recompilation
• the default configurations might not be the most sane

I have found sweet spot and preserved my configuration here for anyone to use.

I use it for my media server and have been for a long time.

Tldr: started so I could learn and understand Linux, still use it since I’m comfortable with it and it’s familiar/fast for my needs.

How it started: I kept going back and forth between windows and Linux, but never truly understood Linux like I did Windows. I eventually decided that I should try to install a Linux distro from scratch and learn the entire process manually so that I could understand it at a strong level. Gentoo has some of the best, if not the best, documentation for this. After spending several days going through the entire install process to finally get that login screen and UI up and running, I had learned more about Linux in those few days than I did the previous 3 years. I wanted to keep going, so I kept it on that laptop and continued to learn and become way more efficient than even Windows.

Why I still use it, specifically for my media server: partly because I understand Gentoo more than any other distro I’ve used, so I’m extremely comfortable with it. But mostly because I know every little thing on my server. I never find things I don’t recognize, because I installed it. I made the explicit decision to all the software I installed on my system. And I truly do feel like I’m in absolute control of the entire thing, in and out. On top of this, it’s truly as high in performance as it sounds.

As I type this, my media server is running 76 docker containers (no, not 76 services), 4 of which are game servers I host 24/7 for friends, and I’m only using 32GB of memory. CPU is rarely, if ever, above 20% (12 core Ryzen). The need to upgrade is really far out there, so that just adds to my reasons to continue using it. That being said, I’ve never run something like a Debian media server with all the same stuff on it… It’s very possible it’s just as good, but I really don’t know. I’m too comfortable where I am to spend time finding out lol.

I ran Gentoo Linux 2003 to about 2008. I initially picked it up because of a hype. However, I loved the degree of customisation over the system that I got at the time. The install process teaches you of alternatives to things that distributions would include. It gave me a lot more choice as to what I used with my system and the process of installing. It definitely made me understand how the system worked a lot more.

I reinstalled it 2023 and I’m still using it too today. My reasons are different now. One is a hint of nostalgia. However, another is the package manager. Since the package manager is only text files, it is very easy to extend and change with your own packages. Releasing packages on other systems is much more involved process.

Another reason is when you compile the code yourself you can choose the options to some it degree with use flags. I still build my own kernel as I can choose what to include and I think I will be moving to a unified Kernel in efi soon and do away with grub.

Using Gentoo compared to most other distributions the system feels more open and more malleable.

While I do consider arch rather similar and I did use it for a couple years. The AUR scared me a bit.

I miss really digging deep into what my system was doing and understanding how the different components worked. I had choices at every step and owned every package, feature, and configuration. Also being able to easily patch and collaborate on fixes with maintainers through a local overlay.

I also feel like that understanding provided a knowledge of dark magics of how and why distros work forged in the mistakes of my Gentoo systems that’s been valuable in my career.

That said, I don’t really have time for it these days. Being able to just turn my computer on and it just works with a mainstream binary distro is a stability I’ve needed for things like work and home servers for family stuff.

Some people aren’t patient with you needing to entirely rebuild your system because you broke an ebuild or didn’t read a news and it trashed your system and it’s got several hours of recompiling system packages ahead of it.

That said I’ll perpetuate the trope and say I broke down and finally started running Arch on some personal machines this year and enjoy it. It’s not the same but it’s filled a bit of that itch and is fun to push the edge and find other people doing the same.

I messed around with it back in college. Had a lab where we had to make our own OS with a purpose. Lots of people made their own digital picture frame. This was back in 2005 when linux and gentoo were rougher around the edges. I tried compiling my own custom kernel. One that had only the drivers needed for my hardware. Took like 2 days per compile. After several tweaks and fixes I got the kernel to compile, but not boot.

Eventually caved and went the easy route of compiling the generic kernel because I had a deadline. I installed xfce, metasploit, nessus, wireshark, and a handful if other tools to make a knockoff kali linux for my project. It was fun, and I learned a lot.

I used to run it on about 800 prod boxes and we provided the hosting for the Gentoo forums. It’ll always have a soft spot in my heart, but even with us using binary packages I won’t miss how long emerge takes.

Your control over the system is so great in Gentoo. While other distros may pull in a dependency you will never use – say like cups – gentoo allows you to remove the dependency by removing support for it at install/compile time.

I love how the portage packages are maintained, it is so easy to find which versions are available, select version, read about why a package is masked and having all the tools for overriding that decision by the package maintainers and install anyway. They inform you about important updates and migrations when you sync your package repository. It is also super easy to patch the code being installed.

I would not say portage is complicated. For most operations you just install a package, sync, and upgrade like you would in any distro. It tales time to do this, sure. What is complicated is, I would say, figuring out how to boot your machine. You want encrypted this or that, dropbear, systemd or openrc, want to manage your initramfs with dracut or make one yourself, distro-kernel or another flavour, and on and on. I also think that the wiki is not very detailed on a lot of what the different systems do and how they talk to each other.

Anyway, I love it. If I would start with Gentoo today, I would install a Gentoo Prefix

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix

There you can get used to the portage package manager withour messing up your system and without doing a reinstall.